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I haven’t been sleeping well, I think it’s because I’m excited. It doesn’t feel like excitement: It just feels like ordinary, miserable insomnia.

I can’t really control my feelings, but can make them into something else. I twist them and try to make them serve other purposes, or to put them on hold. This is after-the-fact reasoning, by necessity: the control that I am trying to exercise over them somehow is going on behind my back and has already actually gone on behind my back, my feelings hit the stage in the wrong costumes.

My west-facing window is divided in two. The north side slides laterally. I don’t think the panes or the frame are original, but the external setting contains some old wood indeed: it’s so weather worn it’s almost not there at all. It’s a bundle of splinters that continue to associate from habit.

The south, fixed side of the window is on the outside. The moving side is backed with a screen, and has a permanent smudge which covers over half its area in a vertically elongated diamond shape; in combination with the screen behind it makes a double distortion. At night, the center of this area glitters and the streetlights beyond grow fuzzy spring dandelion heads.

Most people at work spend most of their time avoiding the work, or trying to slough it off or reduce it. Little attention is spent on their duties or the overall performance of the work. They chat, they space out, they steal office supplies, or spend time on their personal business or recreation, there’s a general tendency to avoid resopnsibility. Many people don’t know some of the basic procedures, aren’t interested to know, want to keep employed and get occasional praise but not much beyond that. And then there’s this as well, there are others who are struggling for power, or trying to shame others or to take work away or spending time attempting to appear better to those in power, and to keep others from that same attention. But it’s the mystery of emergence. Somehow out of all the chaos and competition and contradiction and difficulty and waste, inefficiency, and couterproduction, the overall work done by the department is good, is reliable, is fast; it’s expanding its scope and doing better by all measures all the time.

I’m thinking of starting blogging again. There’s been something missing in my life, and it might just be the instant gratification of instant publication. But I’m not sure that splagkhna currently has quite the right look. So I’d like to ask a question to the floor. What do you think about how it looks, how useable is it? Anyhting that bothers you, what do you like, what should change, what shouldn’t?

Should I add a blog on the sidebar, with links and shorter posts? There are currently only two posts on the front page – does that work, or should I go to a longer, list-type format? Is it easy to find the archives if you want them? Should I keep the categories, or ditch them? Is it easy to read? Is it easy to see when there is a continuation of the post to read on click-through? How about the color scheme, okay to read?

I used to think: faces are like characters, or they match them. It might seem that people don’t look like who they are, but you think that because you haven’t understood yet what they look like. I also used to think (and I’ll still say it, if I’m feeling pressured) that people aren’t who they are:

I don’t know anything about psychology, and I’m not interested enough to learn more than a casual browse on the internet will tell me about the Myers-Briggs personality test. But I never can resist a Cosmo quiz or a horoscope.